Junko Chodos: The Breath of Consciousness, curated by MOCRA director
Rev. Terrence E. Dempsey, S.J., is Japanese-American artist Chodos' first
Midwest exhibition. It surveys the predominant themes and media in her oeuvre.
The exhibition title references a recurrent image in her work, the lungs.
In part originating in her personal history (a childhood battle with tuberculosis),
this prevalent metaphor also takes on universal resonances, signaling the
significance of breathing in the world's faith traditions-as a connection
to life itself, and as a vehicle to practices of meditation, contemplation,
and inner awareness.

The earliest works included in the exhibition are exquisitely complex drawings
of roots and dead flowers that evince both microcosmic and macrocosmic scale:
Chodos elicits worlds of complexity from mundane subjects, leading the viewer
to notice anatomical, architectural and theological associations. Similarly,
Chodos' collages combine a density of myriad elements in a barely held stasis.
It is a dynamic of turbulence and repose, as details are resolved into larger
systems: ribcages and lungs arise from images of engines and horseshoe crabs,
layered with quotations from Renaissance paintings. The exhibition includes
select works from the 1991 series, Requiem for an Executed Bird,
a powerful body of work that delves into the horror of violence, using a
bird as a transformational symbol of innocence that falls prey to injustice
and cruelty, but ultimately achieves hope and resurrection. The survey is
completed by large scroll-like paintings on mylar. These works reveal the
influence of the strong gestures of the American Abstract Expressionists
and the spare, concentrated aesthetic of the calligraphers of Chodos' native
Japan.

Junko
Chodos was born Junko Takahashi in Tokyo, Japan, in 1939. She grew up
in a highly cultured and well-educated family amid the turbulence of World
War II. Early experience of the destructiveness of war would profoundly
affect both her life and her art. She pursued art from a young age and enrolled
at Tokyo's prestigious Waseda University, where she majored in Eastern and
Western art history and the philosophy of art. She also took an interest
in the writings of German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. She moved to
the United State in 1968 for studies at the State University of New York,
Buffalo, and married lawyer and author Rafael Chodos in 1971. They reside
in Topanga, California. Chodos' studies and unusual personal history have
lent her work a global perspective. Her evolving artistic output reveals
the influence of Paul Klee, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell,
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Mathis Grünewald, the Italian Futurists,
and the master calligraphers of Japan. She has an appreciation of a number
of the world's great religions, including Buddhism, Shinto, Christianity,
and Judaism, an awareness complemented by curiosity about technology, biology,
and the natural environment. Chodos has had solo exhibitions in America,
Germany, and Japan.

Dead
Flowers Series No. 5, 1973.
Pen and ink on paper. 22.5 x 16 in.

Junko
Chodos stands out among today's artists for her unflinching look at life
in its fullest sense. She embraces the sacred and the profane, uncovers
beauty in ugliness, and maintains an openness to discovering hope and
peace in a world of struggle and hardship.